Clasp, Angel of the backward look
And folded wings of ashen gray
And voice of echoes far away,
The brazen covers of thy book.…
—JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER
MONICA, DO YOU HAVE A KNIFE?” I asked. After the FroshHum planning meeting, my colleagues and I exited the departmental conference room into the central office. Monica was sorting mail into the professors’ pigeonhole mailboxes. Harriet Person strolled over to the secretary’s desk and began to shuffle through an uneven stack of correspondence.
“The meeting was that bad?” Monica’s expression remained deadpan. I checked for a glint of humor in her dark brown eyes. Nope. She was her usual crabby self. Today she wore an acid-yellow cotton shirt with her khaki pants. The color didn’t work at all well with her sallow complexion.
“Almost,” I replied, and inspected my mail: two letters, a memo, and a publisher’s catalog. “It’s for that big package, you know, the one UPS delivered Friday afternoon. I need something sharp to open it.” I slipped the letters into my book bag. The memo and catalog, like eighty percent of my professional mail, went directly into the trash. Monica turned from her sorting, noted Harriet at her desk, and stiffened. “Excuse me, Professor Person,” she snapped. “Excuse me. That material is confidential.”
Harriet jumped, as if Monica had jabbed her with one of the lethally sharp number-two pencils poking out of her pencil cup. “These are applications for the Palaver Chair, aren’t they?” Monica had just snatched one from her hand.
“Yes. And like I said, they’re confidential.”
Harriet’s expression hardened. “But—”
“You are not on that committee, Professor.” Monica shoved the pile of applications into a desk drawer and twisted a key purposefully in the lock. Then, snubbing Harriet, she turned to me. “Karen, you haven’t opened that box yet? Jeez, you were so hot to get into it when it came, I thought you’da ripped it open with your teeth if you had to.” She pulled a brown canvas bag from a desk drawer and rooted through it, came up with a large Swiss Army knife, and flicked out an efficient-looking blade. “This oughta do the trick.”
“Thanks.” I took the open knife carefully. “I’ll bring it right back.”
“What box is that?” Harriet asked, withdrawing her furious gaze from Monica for a moment. At a small college, everyone wants to know everyone else’s business—as evidenced by my senior colleague’s unauthorized perusal of the job applications.
“Just some big package that came the other day.” I shrugged. “I don’t know what’s in it.”
“A mysterious package? How exciting,” Jane Birdwort said, trailing out of the central office behind me. Damn, is there no privacy on this campus? A person can’t even get a package! What do they think I’m expecting? A male stripper in a birthday cake?
The big box stood exactly where I’d left it, halfway between my desk and the captain’s chair. I removed the key from the door lock and dumped my book bag on the green vinyl chair. I had attracted a retinue. Along with Harriet and Jane, Amber Nichols and Monica had followed me into my office.
“You really don’t know who sent it?” Harriet admonished. “Then, for God’s sake, Karen, don’t open it! You remember we got that memo from the security office?”
I did remember. Professors had received a “security alert” memo warning us to be on the lookout for suspicious packages in the wake of exploding parcel bombs at several colleges. The idea of a parcel bomb on a bucolic little campus like Enfield’s had seemed ludicrous to me, and that memo, too, had gone into the trash.
“Harriet,” I replied, “they’ve caught the Unabomber. He’s in prison.”
“Yeah, but who knows what other crazies are out there—”
“Can’t be many more than there are on this campus,” Monica muttered.
“Karen, I’m serious,” Harriet persisted, scowling. She ran a hand distractedly through her short, white-streaked hair. “You can’t be too careful. Right-wing conspirators will do anything to derail the feminist project—”
“Fuck that! I’m curious. Let me at it!” Jane grabbed the open Swiss Army knife from my hand and plunged it into the box. Along with everyone else in the room, I jumped back at least three feet. No explosion ensued.
“What are you all up to in there?”
The abrupt male voice startled us, and Jane’s blade tore a long, jagged zigzag through the cardboard. I knew just how she felt; the gruff query just at the moment of penetration had set my heart racing. Elliot Corbin loomed in the doorway, an officious expression on his face. Handball was done for the day, and Elliot was showered and groomed, and once again ready to stick his nose into his colleagues’ business. It occurred to me that this was the second time today this man had surveyed me from a doorway.
“You might as well come in, Elliot. Everyone else is here.” Along with my rather cool regard, four other sets of female eyes watched Elliot enter the room. Odd, I thought, when he’s such an attractive man, that these women should all look so … so, unwelcoming. Jane’s eyes held a spooked expression. Amber’s mien could only be described as calculating, eyes narrowed, facial muscles immobile. Harriet’s countenance had taken on a stony aspect, like marble chiseled in sharp planes. And Monica—Monica’s expression was perhaps the least complicated of the group: Monica was furious, plain and simple furious. Puzzling, all this ill will. But it wasn’t Elliot who interested me at the moment: It was my box.
I plucked Monica’s knife from Jane’s suddenly limp hand. Slitting the packaging tape, I ripped open the top of the carton. Thick bubble wrap obscured the contents, but an envelope addressed Professor Pelletier was taped to the top layer, the handwriting the same almost illegible scrawl as that on the box’s label. I held the envelope up to the light and squinted at it.
“Open it, Karen,” Monica grumbled. I did. Gingerly. No explosion.
Professor Pelletier, the enclosed typed letter read, Recently, in clearing out the attic of my late uncle’s home in Greenwich, I came across the old books and letters I’ve enclosed here. They are signed with the name Emmeline Foster—Behind me Amber exclaimed, “Emmeline Foster? Really?”
Harriet, too, peered over my shoulder. “Who’s Emmeline Foster?” she asked.
“She was a poet,” I replied distractedly. “About a hundred and fifty years ago.” Emmeline Foster? Hadn’t her name just come up in class? She was the New York poet who’d drowned herself in the Hudson—or North River, as it was then called—when Poe was living in lower Manhattan.
I continued aloud: “Since inquiries at the New York Public Library have disclosed that Miss Foster was a New York poetess whose writing had a brief vogue during the middle of the nineteenth century—”
“Is that Poe’s Emmeline Foster?” Elliot interjected. I had forgotten he was in the room.
I glanced up from the letter. “Well, I think she belonged to herself, not to Poe, but, yes, I imagine it’s the same Emmeline Foster.”
“… I have decided to forward this substantial body of papers to you. Having read in the Enfield alumni magazine about the bequest to the college of a Center for the Study of Women Writers to be instituted under your direction—”
“The Northbury Center,” Harriet said, on a meditatively calculating note.
“Ten million dollars,” Elliott said, running his tongue over his teeth.
The previous year, the great-granddaughter of the nineteenth-century novelist Serena Northbury had left Enfield College her ancestral home and a goodly chunk of her fortune to endow a research center and library dedicated to the study of American women writers. Her sole stipulation was that I must serve as director of the Center. Ever since the announcement of the bequest, my colleagues had been trying to horn in on running the research institute that was to be established at the Northbury mansion.
“Well, yes. The will is likely to be tied up in court for a while, but the college is already soliciting donations of authors’ papers for the research library. These are the first we’ve received.”
“Hmm,” Amber Nichols said. It was one of those hmms that resonate with unspecified significance.
I glanced at her. I understood only too well my senior colleagues’ self-interested focus on anything pertaining to the Northbury Center, but I was puzzled by Amber’s interest in such an obscure poet as Foster. She raised her eyebrows, and spoke in her high, precise voice. “I’m interested in the destabilization of established constructs of authorship afforded by the disruptive intrusion into the epistemological field of previously marginalized authorial modes and venues.”
I stared at her for the three or four seconds it took to translate. “Yeah, me too,” I said, and turned back to the letter: “… I feel certain that this is the best disposition of this material. My late uncle, Christopher Cummins, was heir to the family estate of Edward Cummins of the nineteenth-century Manhattan publishing house, Cummins and Sons, and Miss Foster seems to have been one of their authors. At least, I assume so from her letters to Edward, and from the enclosed books and personal memorabilia that somehow ended up in his possession.
I am certain that you will know far better than I what to do with this material. Feel free to call on me if there is anything more I can tell you.”
The letter closed with a Manhattan address and phone number, and was signed “Alex Warren.”
“Wow!” I was delighted. “I don’t know much at all about Emmeline Foster—I don’t think anyone does—but it looks like we’re about to learn. Let’s see what we’ve got here.”
I rummaged through the layers of bubble wrap and seized the first object that came to hand, a small blue leather-bound notebook with page after page of close handwriting. Leafing through the book, I saw that from beginning to end its pages were covered with lines of poetry. I read a verse at random.
The tumult in the shadowed woods,
The babble in the tree,
The clamor in the scudding clouds,
Speak silently of thee.…
Nothing new or startling there, I thought. A poem about love, in conventional verse form. Pretty typical for nineteenth-century women’s poetry. Monica and Harriet had begun pulling books and manuscripts helter-skelter out of the box. I laid the little notebook on the table and moved to forestall them: This was not a professional way to go about receiving a donation to our new research library. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Amber pick up the blue notebook and riffle through it, then pause to read a poem. I turned back to retrieve it, and as I did so, Elliot plucked it from her hand. She glared at him, and seemed about to protest, when Jane, who’d been silent since Elliot’s arrival, distracted us all with an abrupt exclamation.
“Karen, look at this picture! Is this Emmeline Foster?”
A hinged brass portrait case opened to reveal an astonishingly clear daguerreotype image, a head-and-shoulders portrait of a delicate-looking young woman with bunches of dark ringlets framing her thin face. Amazing! Fifteen decades ago, a photographer had manipulated iodine, mercury vapors, and common table salt to affix a woman’s image to this copper plate, and here that image remained. I took the daguerreotype case by its edges and studied the portrait closely.
“I’ve never seen this picture before,” I said, thinking back to my research on the popular poets. “As far as I recall, there’s only one known portrait of Emmeline Foster, and it’s an engraving, not a daguerreotype.” Plucking the thick, well-worn Encyclopedia of American Women Authors from one of the floor-to-ceiling bookcases, I turned pages rapidly until I came to the F’s. “Fergusson, Fern, Fields—Foster. Here we are: Look, there’s the engraving.” The sketch was typical of the period, a black-and-white line drawing with its subject captured in a demure pose.
“This is the same woman—Emmeline,” Amber exclaimed. She had taken the daguerreotype from Jane, and now she placed it next to the picture in the reference book. Her voice held an unmistakable note of excitement. “Look, the same curly hair, the broad forehead—”
“The button nose, the rosebud mouth, the porcelain complexion,” Elliot interjected, sarcastically. “Dearest Emmeline was a walking compendium of hackneyed poetic conventions.”
I shot him a nasty look. “Maybe that’s why Poe was so interested in her.”
Behind me, Amber Nichols emitted a sharp, instantly suppressed bark of laughter.
Monica was reading through the encyclopedia entry. “Unlike most of what goes on around here,” she remarked, “this is actually sort of interesting.”
“What does it say?” Harriet asked. “I don’t have my glasses.”
Monica plopped herself down at my desk and read aloud from the open encyclopedia. “FOSTER, Emmeline Charlotte (1811–1845). Little is known of this poet’s early life, as she refused to disclose personal details to the editors and anthologists who clamored for her verse in the early 1840’s. She arrived in New York City in late 1839 after having had poems published in Ladies’ Magazine and in Godey’s Lady’s Book. Some reports suggest she was the daughter of a prominent Hudson River family, but, although she was established comfortably in the elite society of the New York literary and cultural scene, she never mentioned the source of her income to her Manhattan friends. Foster published widely in the periodicals of the day, and her one book, The Nightingale (1842), was produced by Cummins and Sons, and well received by contemporary reviewers. Nonetheless, after Foster’s early death, her work slipped into obscurity. Emmeline Foster is perhaps best remembered as one of Edgar Allan Poe’s lady loves, and it is rumored that her death by drowning in the Hudson River near the house occupied by Edgar and Virginia Poe, was no accident, but rather, as one contemporaneous newspaper said, ‘the desperate act of a woman scorned.’ ”
“That’s fascinating,” Monica said. “The desperate act of a woman scorned. Just like a romance novel.” These were the only words of approbation I had ever heard from our cranky secretary.
When everyone had finally tired of the new toy and left, I began to repack the box, not quite knowing what to do with this unexpected bonus. Its contents had certainly cluttered up my office. Books and papers were piled on the desk, the floor, the chairs, wherever a bare surface had been found. A stack of composition books on the floor caught my eye. The thin books were tied together with a length of maroon grosgrain ribbon. I sat cross-legged, pulled the stack toward me, untied the careful bow with a tug on the ribbon, and spread ten identical black-covered school notebooks around me. Feeling eerily like a voyeur, I opened the first. A young person’s round, unformed handwriting filled the blue-ruled page from top to bottom, side to side, leaving no margins.
19 November 1824
my thirteenth birthday
Dear Friend, for I shall call you my friend for now and ever, today Papa gave you to me, to practice my penmanship he said for it needs much to be improved. A Lady’s hand he said must always be decorative, and my scrawl as it is would never grace any epistle of Love. Fond, foolish Papa, as if any beau would wish a letter from such a scapegrace as I! Instead of my copybook, you shall become my confidant, for it is lonely here. Papa is much away and Mama lies long days in bed with the sick headache. I read today in the Ladies Magazine a verse by Mrs. Sigourney that I like very much. I wonder how a young lady gets to be a poet??? Must ask Papa.
My name is Emmeline Foster and I am thirteen today. I presume I should think Important Thoughts on such an auspicious date but have none on hand. There will be roasted goose for dinner and Annie promised a raisin cake with sugar icing. I think Papa has a story by Miss Austen for me—he has been hinting about it forever!!! Mama says I should be a very grateful girl and I am sure I am. Miss Ross is calling for me to come down to lessons. I will write more tomorrow, and I vow everyday hereafter.
I raised my eyes from the page. Emmeline Foster’s journal! And ten volumes long! Had the poet kept it up throughout her entire life? If she had, I might be able to uncover the truth about her death. Surely if she had been as desperately in love with Poe as was rumored, she would have written copiously about her feelings. Greedily I opened the final notebook somewhere close to the end. A more mature handwriting met my eye, prim, rounded little letters.
3 October 1844
Dear Friend:
Today I walked down Broadway as far as the Astor Hotel. Am beginning to recover strength and flesh and trust that if the weather holds fine I will sit in the sun one full hour a day and write again.
The large Maple in the square displays a single branch of scarlet foliage even this early in the season and the leaves dance. I read in the book of Miss Barrett’s poems dear Fanny gave me. Otherwise I am idle, but content—although it is hard to be alone in this big City. Mr. Poe has written, requesting another poem, but I declined. When I am ready to publish the new verses I will offer them to Mrs. Hale. Though I would not admit it to a living soul, I know they will be my Triumph!—
“Professor Pelletier?”
The voice yanked me far too abruptly from the past to the present. Shamega Gilfoyle, a senior English major, stood in the doorway regarding me curiously. Dark eyebrows furrowed quizzically in her slender face. “We’re waiting for you?” she informed me, with the interrogatory lilt of the truly puzzled.
“Waiting?” I rubbed my right eye with the heel of a grimy hand.
“Yes. Some people thought we should leave, but I said I’d check and see if you were coming. I knew you were on campus ’cause I saw you this morning in the coffee shop.”
I stared at Shamega blankly, then slapped my forehead. “The seminar! I’m supposed to be in class! What time is it?”
“Two forty-five,” Shamega responded. “Should I tell them you’re coming?”
“Yes!” I jumped up from my cross-legged position on the floor, brushing myriad paper specks from my trousers. “Give me five minutes,” I said, then hastily gathered up Emmeline Foster’s notebooks, retied the ribbon, and placed the stacked journals in the box. As I gathered up my own textbook and class notes, I noticed that I had overlooked one of the old copybooks, so I scooped it up, crammed it in my book bag with everything else, and hurried out the door, twisting the knob to make certain the lock was engaged.
I was hustling across campus when it hit me that Emmeline Foster’s little blue book of verses had not been among the artifacts I’d repacked with the other Foster materials.